{"id":578553,"date":"2025-09-09T17:10:40","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T17:10:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/blog\/?post_type=blog&p=578553"},"modified":"2025-09-10T22:28:27","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T22:28:27","slug":"a-new-national-platform-transforms-wildfire-data-into-actionable-insights","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/blog\/articles\/a-new-national-platform-transforms-wildfire-data-into-actionable-insights","title":{"rendered":"A New National Platform Transforms Wildfire Data into Actionable Insights"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the heart of the American Southwest, wildfire isn\u2019t just an ecological challenge, it\u2019s a public safety and social concern. Communities here live under wildfire\u2019s constant threat, and data-driven decisions aren\u2019t just nice to have; they\u2019re essential. Enter the Southwest Ecological Restoration Institutes (SWERI)<\/a>. Since its beginning in 2004, this coalition of regional institutes has made it its mission to transform science into actionable insights for land management.<\/p>\n\n

But things really shifted gears in 2021. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act tasked SWERI with something big: to build a national-scale tool for consolidating and visualizing wildfire and fuel treatment data. The result was the Treatment and Wildfire Interagency Geodatabase (TWIG)<\/a>. TWIG is designed to empower everyone from policymakers and researchers to local land managers and the public to view a wealth of wildland fire data.<\/p>\n\n

SWERI\u2019s structure was key to TWIG\u2019s success. Three historically independent institutes\u2014the Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI)<\/a> at Northern Arizona University, the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute (CFRI)<\/a> at Colorado State University, and the New Mexico Forest and Watershed Restoration Institute (NMFWRI)<\/a> at New Mexico Highlands University\u2014joined forces to tackle this national challenge.<\/p>\n\n

The vision for TWIG wasn\u2019t just about compiling data; it was about making that data universally accessible. SWERI identified fragmented datasets across platforms that were sometimes difficult to access for anyone lacking at least some geographic information system (GIS) chops. So, SWERI staff set out to build a user-friendly, intuitive platform that democratizes data access and bridges technical divides.<\/p>\n\n

Partnering with Innovate! Inc.<\/a>, a GIS-focused tech firm, SWERI built TWIG from the ground up on robust cloud infrastructure. Why GIS? Simple: Wildfire management is inherently spatial. Every fire happens somewhere, right?<\/p>\n\n

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Here\u2019s what TWIG delivers:<\/h3>\n\n